From the publisher's jacket blurb, as quoted by Amazon.CAUTION: protect your monitor - swallow all liquid beverages before you read any further.
THE GOVERNOR provides the most comprehensive look to date at the life of a twice-elected public official in the notoriously complicated world of Illinois politics. We take a tour through the segregated neighborhoods of Chicago, a city of great ethnic diversity, and see firsthand how those divides can evolve into cabals that rival anything found on the national political scene.
We follow the governor as he is awakened early one morning --his young daughter sleeping peacefully beside him -- and unceremoniously arrested by FBI agents without knowing the charges being brought against him. We see the harsh glare of the spotlight, the media whirlwind already staking out his home and family, rushing to judgment before even the governor himself knew what crimes he'd
"Ahh, but the senate seat that's... that's where I had them. They laughed at me and made jokes and called me mad, mad, MAD I SAY! but I proved beyond the shadow of a doubt and with... geometric logic... that a duplicate key to the Senate DID exist, and I'd have produced that key if they hadn't of pulled Burris out of action...."
The behind-the-scenes workings to fill the Senate seat vacated by the most popular President-elect in decades becomes something much more incendiary when wiretapped conversations are used by authorities to commit the arrest. But, as the governor soon learns, those tapes are not allowed to be played at his impeachment hearings in the House or Senate. What is on those tapes?
Quoting from sources as diverse as Jim Wallis' God's Politics to Aeschylus , Shakespeare,
It is a mandate for healthcare reform, which the governor feels is the civil rights issue of our lifetime. It is a clarion cry, remarkably, against cynicism in modern governing and a return to a more thoughtful and informed sense of government that views its state budgets as "moral documents."
"It's the old Golden Rule: we gots the gold, and we writes the rules!"
It is a lament against the current state of the political landscape, one that too often is wracked by scandal and interwoven with a media-driven culture obsessed with scandal and snap judgments.
"That's scandalous!"
"Don't be so judgmental."
"Oh, snap!"
And it is a proclamation that one man will not